A blog to complement university courses
When I was a student, university courses where an opportunity for the professor to teach all the important principles on a given topics to the students who registered for the course. At that time, students almost only used the course syllabus or one reference book. They rarely went to the library to seek additional information on any topic discussed by the professor. This forced the professor to be as complete as possible and cover all the important topics during the classes.
Today’s professors have a completely different job. Given the vast amount of information that is available to all students over the Internet, university courses have become a starting point that guide students in their exploration of the course topic. It remains important to teach the key principles to the student, but it becomes equally important to encourage them to explore the field by themselves. There are several activities that professors can organise in their classes to encourage the students to go further. For example, my networking course is based on the open-source Computer Networking: Principles, Protocols and Practice ebook. Initially, the ebook was distributed as a pdf file. The students were satisfied with the contents of the ebook, but they almost never spent time in the library to look at the books and articles referenced in the bibliography. This changed dramatically in 2011 after I modified the bibliography to include clickable URLs for most cited references. Since then, I observed that more and more students spent time to look at some references, including RFCs, to better understand specific parts of the course.
Another activity that I organise within the networking course to encourage students to explore the field is the detailed analysis of a popular website that each student has to carry out. During the last month of the semester, i.e. once the students has understood the basics of computer networking and some of the key protocols, each student has to apply his/her knowledge by writing a detailed four-page report that analyses the operation of a popular website. During the course, the students learns the basics of DNS, TLS, HTTP, TCP, IPv6 and they mobilise this knowledge to understand the protocol optimisations done by popular websites. They use standard tools such as the developper extensions of web browsers, dig, traceroute, wireshark, tcpdump, or openssl to interact with the website and analyse the protocol optimisation that it supports. During this analysis, they often see unexpected results that force them to understand in more details one of these protocols by looking at tutorials on the web, scientific articles or internet drafts and RFCs. With this kind of activity, the students gain a more in-depth knowlege of the Internet protocols that are explained during the course. More importantly, they also learn to find accurate technical information on the web, which is a very important skill for any computer scientist.
The exam is an important event for the students. It confirms that they have mastered the topic. However, the topics that were discussed during the course continue to evolve after the exam. While the basic principles of computer networking are stable, Internet protocols continue to evolve at a rapid pace. Various updates have been made to the Computer Networking: Principles, Protocols and Practice ebook. This ensures that future students will use up-to-date material to start their exploration of the networking field. However, former students are also interested in the evolution of the field and do not want to wait for the next edition of the ebook. For them, I have launched a companion blog for the ebook. On this blog, I summarise recent news, articles, or Internet drafts that could affect the evolution of the field. This blog is also available as an RSS feed.